Digging out

Martha's and Sammy's mess-ups have made headlines. But what if you trip up in your career--and need to stage a comeback?

June 25, 2003|By Brenda McCarthy.

You haven't been indicted for insider trading. And even in Little League, you never corked your bat. But what if the slight mistruth on your resume catches up to you? Or you make an unintentional--but career-damaging--mistake? How do you begin to recover from your own career blunder?

"Most people will be tempted to judge Martha Stewart or Sammy Sosa, without realizing it can happen to them, too, just on a smaller scale," said Kristin Taliaferro, a Dallas-based career coach who runs the Web site KristinCoach.com.

Gaffes like an unearthed resume lie might seem minor in comparison to headline-grabbing slip-ups involving the likes of Martha Stewart, Sammy Sosa or New York Times editors. But in the sphere most people live in, such mistakes can potentially ruin a career and, therefore, be just as debilitating and hard to recover from as a Page One incident is for a public figure.

Although everyone makes mistakes, how you handle the situation often determines whether your career nosedives or revives. Owning up to a mistake straight away often is the best recipe for damage control, Taliaferro says. Her advice: "Don't let one blunder become another by lying."

"One person I recruited for a marketing role in the health-care industry said she was a nurse when she wasn't," recalled Taliaferro, who spent seven years as a recruiter before becoming a career coach.

When the deception was revealed, the woman lost her job--and her marketing career, even though a nursing degree wasn't required for the position. Instead of acknowledging her mistruth when confronted by her employer, she lied again, damaging her credibility beyond repair.

"She never did recover," Taliaferro said.

Taliaferro's client, like many people who endure a career blow, suffered a crisis of confidence that prevented her from moving beyond the incident.

Such crises can result even when your mistake is not deliberate. This was the case for Larry, a New Yorker who asked to be identified only by his first name. While working as an editor in 1995, Larry made an unintentional goof when drafting materials for one of his company's clients, a New Jersey pharmaceutical company.

"They were working on a new drug that helps kidney transplant victims live," he explained. The new drug was replacing an older drug that subsequently had been found to harm patients, but Larry got the drugs confused.

"I accidentally used the old drug's name," he said. "Instead of listing one that cures you, I listed the one that kills you."

As a result, every piece of marketing and educational collateral that had been distributed--textbooks, literature, slide presentations, demonstrations and videos--had to be recalled. The pharmaceutical company fired Larry's company, which in turn fired Larry. Shaken by his experience, Larry decided that medical editing might not be for him. He refocused his career in a direction that since has brought him satisfaction and success.

It's hard to see beyond your blunder to identify the changes you need to make, but that is exactly the correct next step, says Richard C. Hyde, executive vice president at Hill and Knowlton, a public relations firm in New York.

"You have to determine the strengths that you have--your assets and capabilities, although this is sometimes difficult to do at the time," Hyde said.

As the director of his company's U.S. Crisis Communications Group, Hyde counsels corporations through setbacks.

"I think there are definitely lessons from the corporate world that can be applied to individuals," said Hyde, who cites the rebound of the Tylenol brand after several people died from poison that had been inserted into the capsules in 1982.

"A lot of people said that brand . . . would never make a comeback, but it did," Hyde said. "The company [Johnson & Johnson] took a very careful assessment of the situation and determined that [the incident] was not their fault, but they took responsibility for it so no one would be harmed in the same manner."

Taking responsibility for the mistake or blunder is an essential step in recovering from a career gaffe, says Kathy Green, president of Executive Coaching Connections LLC in Wilmette, especially when the mistake has to do with a character breach or a failing in skills.

"The key is to genuinely ... do some soul searching and to provide those around you with examples of steps you've taken to right the situation," said Green, who insists a mistake can help equip a person to achieve more in his or her career.

"My work is with VPs and above, and I'd say 90 percent of my clients talk about overcoming a difficult event early in their career," Green said. "In fact, [getting past mistakes] is really how great leaders are made. If the person can view it as an opportunity to become better and more effective, that person is more likely to succeed."

Need to turn your career lemon into lemonade? Taliaferro, Hyde and Green offer tips on how to make things right: